Production of Myth and Identity: Politics of Assimilation in "Love and Vertigo" KAJAL BHATKAL College

“These are the myths I tell about my family and, like all myths, they are both truths and lies, simultaneous buffers of love and betrayals of trust.” (Hsu-Ming Teo 1)

Love and Vertigo is a contemporary autobiographical novel that maps the lineage of the speaker Grace and her parents’ imminent immigration to Australia. The novel moves through three pertinent spaces of Singapore, Malaysia, and Australia and intriguingly all these three spaces are interlocked with cultural and political myths and trauma. Hsu-Ming Teo in her text intricately engages with moments of transformation from Birth to Social influx, Traditional Chinese culture to Westernised English Culture, and in relationship dynamics within family. Love and Vertigo as an autobiographical novel tries to draw attention to the convoluted life of a diasporic family where the struggle of assimilation not just results in complicated social and religious relationships but the absent present past and isolated presence within the space of Australia results in cultural and identity anxiety which is experienced differently by all the characters involved. She draws attention towards how trauma, myths, religion, anxiety, abuse, and assimilation are highly individualistic...